Analytic philosophy is the dominant philosophical movement of English-speaking countries, although one of its founders, Gottlob Frege, was German, and another, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was Austrian.

The term "analytic philosophy" in part denotes the fact that most of this philosophy traces its roots to the movement of "logical analysis" at the beginning of the century; in part the term serves to distinguish "analytic" from other kinds of philosophy, especially "continental philosophy".

Language is the principal—or perhaps the only—tool of the philosopher.

Because of this emphasis on language, analytic philosophy was widely, though perhaps mistakenly, taken to involve a turn toward language as the subject matter of philosophy, and it was taken to involve an accompanying methodological turn toward linguistic analysis.

This post-linguistic analytic philosophy cannot be defined in terms of a common set of philosophical views or interests, but it can be loosely characterized in terms of its style, which tends to emphasize precision and thoroughness about a narrow topic and to deemphasize the imprecise or cavalier discussion of broad topics.

What mattered for the development of analytic philosophy on the whole was the emergence in the second decade of the twentieth century of a new view of reality tailored to fit recent developments in formal logic and the philosophical methodology connected to it, as discussed in Section 2b.